According to Mauro Porcini – senior vice president and chief design officer of the colossus PepsiCo in New York since July 2012 – excellence is far more than the culmination of a creative process. It is a new geological era. Excellence represents the true Anthropocene, and we’ve been catapulted into it by the digital age. Now every flawed idea is inevitably superseded by a better vision, thanks to a Darwinian mechanism that rewards the most empathic and not the most voracious, the good and not the bad. In this scenario, the smallest players can overtake giants thanks to the unprecedented availability of venture capital flowing into ecosystems conceived by all kinds of visionaries, all over the globe.
“For years we’ve been living in a world of incremental innovations, where products and services have been updated with superficial restyling, in keeping with the lipstick-on-a-pig formula,” explains Porcini, who dropped into Condé Nast’s offices while visiting Milan. “But now we’ve entered an age of substantial innovations.” The motor of this change is not a product but a process, summed up in what Porcini calls “design thinking”, as he explains in his book L’età dell’eccellenza: innovazione e creatività per costruire un mondo migliore (“The Age of Excellence: Innovation and Creativity to Build a Better World”, published by Il Saggiatore).
This rationale implies a natural penchant for innovation, experimentation and prototyping, an approach that Porcini assimilated at Milan Polytechnic before embarking on a brilliant career. After an illustrious stint as head of design at the multinational 3M, he moved on to Pepsi, where at the age of 46 he now heads a team of 300 spread across 15 design centres around the world. “In terms of interdisciplinarity, we’re unique. Our approach conditions everything at Pepsi. One of my team members teaches design thinking at all company functions.”
Do you think you might have written an overly optimistic book?
No, because I see myself as an innovator, and innovators need to be optimistic. That doesn’t mean being naive, but seeing the snags and having the right mindset to solve them. The world is bound to fall into the hands of unicorns: people who are proactive and always looking for root causes, aesthetes with a holistic soul. Unicorns can’t waste energy on pessimism.
So unicorns are good.
Being good means being a functional part of projects and kindling the desire to share. Bad people cause colleagues and co-workers to take preventive backup measures to try and neutralise hostile scenarios. This leads to a series of redundant actions, like the secretive development of parallel projects where sharing is just a pretence, which is harmful for productivity and organisation. All too often companies underestimate this factor and reward professionals who obtain excellent business results but lack interpersonal skills, who are disruptive and shatter synergies.
Then what happens?
Companies spend millions on outside consultants to improve processes, and they fail to realise that the mistake was putting a bad person in charge of those processes in the first place. A process is like a brush: if you put it in the hand of a fool or a Picasso, you get different results. In the age of excellence, there’ll be no space for products and services designed by bad people.
Why?
Because they’ll oblige companies to give the right answers to the wrong questions. And those firms will be swept away.
(Continues)
